“Next,” he says, stepping around me, dropping to his knees and organizing his tools to the right. Shaving cream. My razor. A small bowl that’s collected shower water to rinse it.
I shut my eyes, suddenly panicked, overwhelmed. It’s too much, too intimate.
But right as I open my eyes, as I’m about to tell him I can’t do this, Oliver pushes up on his knees and faces me with a beard of shaving cream, thick white gloop pasted across his eyebrows, too.
I snort an involuntary laugh that echoes around the shower. He looks ridiculous.
“Hey, now,” he says, striking a pose. “No laughing. I look good. Like Santa Claus who got Botox.”
“Stop,” I say hoarsely. “Stop making me laugh. It hurts.”
My back does hate to laugh. But my heart loves it, this moment that he’s here at my feet, being ridiculous for my sake.
“Oh, damn.” He squints. “Shaving cream in my eye.”
“Come here.” I wipe the shave cream that’s dripped over his eye, cup my hand into the shower water overhead, until it’s full, then gently rinse it, too, half washing away his ridiculous shaving cream beard, too. “There.”
His eyes crack open, then meet mine.
I tell myself to let go, my hand to stop cupping his face, my thumb to stop sliding along the sharp plane of his cheekbone.
But I can’t.
I just…can’t. I can’t fight it any longer. I feel…broken. My body, my resolve. I’ve built my walls so many fucking times, only for Oliver to crash through them over and over again, and I simply cannot turn him away again.
I lean closer. Oliver leans in too, until our mouths are so close. Until I realize I’d get a mouthful of shaving cream if I did what I want. Oliver seems to realize this, too. He jerks away, looking self-conscious. Like some freakish contortionist, he arches back deeply under the water and rinses his face.
If I attempted that right now, I’d die. Just die of pain.
I wait for my familiar envy, resentment, anger to flood my body, to wipe away my desire for him.
But it doesn’t come.
Instead, this horrible, awful ache settles in my heart, a knot slipping around it, tightening. I have the most terrifying thought—no, vision?—that this knot, insistent and tight, is the end of a tether, and that tether, gossamer fine yet tensile strong, stretches from my heart, through the air and space and fuck, even time, and its other end, its home, is a knot like mine, around another’s heart.
Around his.
Oblivious to my world-upending thoughts, Oliver straightens and shakes like a wet dog, sprinkling me.
“Oi.” I scowl at him.
“Like you weren’t wet already.” He grins, back to his playful self as he pushes up on his knees again, shaving cream in hand.
Eyes on his task, he lathers it on my neck, along my beard.
“Nice and steady,” he says as he grips the razor in one hand, my chin in the other.
I swallow. Oliver smiles a wicked sort of grin, eyes on his task. “Do you know how much self-control it’s taking not to sing Sweeney Todd right now?”
“Just what I want to hear with a blade at my neck: you’re feeling inspired by a murderous singing barber.”
His grin widens, eyes on his task still, his grip on my jaw firm and steady as he drags the blade up my neck. “For someone who ‘doesn’t like musicals,’ you know an awful lot about them.”
I fight the urge to swallow but can’t help it. The nervous need overwhelms me. “After that first game, when we watched Hamilton…”
Oliver pauses shaving me, meeting my eyes. “After Hamilton…？”
“I…” Another nervous swallow. “You said Lin-Manuel Miranda was Sondheim and Shakespeare. High praise. I love poetry, love Shakespeare’s sonnets. So…I started poking around Sondheim musicals. Found a few I liked.”
His hand falters. Now it’s his turn to swallow thickly. “Which ones?”
“Sweeney Todd. Such a bizarre story, but ‘Johanna,’ that first stanza, the lyricism… Then Into the Woods. Weird but rather deliciously dark and catchy. Company. Delightfully irreverent. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Fucking hilarious. And, of course, West Side Story. Which definitely did not, as the youths say, ‘get me in my feels.’”
Oliver bites his lip. “You cried like a baby when Tony sang ‘Maria’ didn’t you?”
“I did no such thing.”
He rolls his eyes, returning back to shaving my neck.
“I may have shed a few brief, manly tears.”
He snorts. “Manly tears. As if our masculinity’s threatened when we weep freely and feel feelings, or worse, learn how to articulate them. The horror!”
I laugh quietly. “It’s horse shit.”
“That it is,” he says, gently tipping my chin down, starting on the edge of my beard along my cheek.
“Your dad didn’t raise you that way?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Nope. My dad hugs me just as much as he hugs my sisters, just as hard and long as my mom does. Actually, often longer.” He laughs quietly. “Kisses my head still every time he says goodbye. Wouldn’t change it for the world.”
I stare at him, recognizing another yawning gap, another world of difference between us. “You’re very lucky.”
Oliver nods, eyes on his task. “Don’t I know it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he’s scary as hell when he’s mad, but that has lots more to do with him being my height, broad as a house, than with him getting particularly loud, and never rough physically. He’s a giant teddy bear, really, who I’ve always been desperately afraid to disappoint.”
I roll my eyes. “Like you ever disappointed him.”
Oliver glances up. His face guarded. “Hayes, the pranks I played on you, that’s nothing compared to what I was capable of when I was younger. I mean, I was a mischief-making pain in the ass. That halo over my head?” He points to the head in question. “A recent turn of events. Just since I signed with the Galaxy. Figured I better clean up the act.”
“Hmm.” I peer down at him. “Well, for what it’s worth, I’ve liked it when your halo slipped a little. It’s good, you know. To not care quite so much, to not please everyone, all the time.”
He shrugs, dipping the razor in the water, rinsing it. “Yeah. I’m starting to figure that out. It just feels…safer to be what people need, to keep things positive rather than sharing the messy stuff. I hide behind that upbeat front. It’s not all purely good intentions.”
“Everyone hides,” I tell him. “One way or another. At least your way is kind. You see people in a way others don’t. You see the good in them. You make them feel special and appreciated. You hold on to hope in moments that are so easy to be cynical about. If that’s not bravery, nothing fucking is. Don’t discredit yourself.”
Oliver stares at me, eyes wide, a faint, warm pink on his cheeks. The razor clatters from his hand to the water bowl. He swallows thickly. “Hayes.”
Heat fills me, until I’m sure I’m as flushed as he is. I don’t regret what I said. But I do regret how exposed I feel. How aware I am that but for a few square inches of terry cloth covering the essential bits, I am naked, Oliver wedged between my thighs. “Bergman.”